We write about everything. We capture it in photos and on video, and we share the links with online acquaintances known only by their login handle. It is too early in the social networking phenomenon to declare whether this practice is beneficial or not. What is undeniable, however, is that we live in a transparent age right now.
A paradigm shift towards presence
Is microblogging something new? Young services like Twitter and Tumblr are seen by some as a natural evolution of personal presence on the Internet, filling a gap between blogging and social networking. Some say it is in the process of obsoleting email.
Visualizing the information stream
Not so long ago, Digg challenged its community to a contest to make use of the Digg API to feed creative and dynamic Flash visualizations. Digg Radar, a visualization of new diggs created by Brian Shaler and profiled here in the summer, was one of the entries that tried to move the news stream out of the standard most-popular list format that is the default of the site. Although Twitter has not yet issued a similar challenge, their open API is already being used by some developers to examine the information stream in new ways.